


Kind Sleepless Lies

by Ash_Cassidy97



Series: This is Your Heart [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Awesome Leia, Badass Leia, Badass Rey, Holivid night, Insomnia, Luke is less of a dick in this, Luke is so angsty, Movie Night, Multi, Naked Cuddling, Nightmares, PTSD, Platonic Cuddling, Sharing a Bed, but no sexy times, implied PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-16
Updated: 2016-02-16
Packaged: 2018-05-21 00:09:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6030937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ash_Cassidy97/pseuds/Ash_Cassidy97
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The rampant insomnia of Resistance fighters and the reasons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kind Sleepless Lies

Finn slept naked.

 

He had grown up in an all white environment with coarse night clothes. The fabric had itched against his bruises and cuts that he had acquired during the day. Stormtroopers didn’t need to sleep much (Poe shook his head). Those clothes had felt as oppressive as his amour. They said ‘this nightmare will be reality in the morning, and you will get up, burn things in the name of the First Order, and people will be dead because of your brothers, your sisters, because of you’.

 

So yeah, Finn slept naked, curled up on the bed without a sheet over him. He had a blaster next to his side and laid perfectly still. He was a sanitation trooper in the same way that Leia was a princess. He didn’t sleep well.

 

He started sharing a room with Poe Dameron. Poe was kind. He’d taken one look at a man who was his enemy and said “you know, I think you are good, you are a good man”. Finn had taken one look at his supposed enemies and said “you know, I think I can do better, we can do better.”

 

Poe said one word about how Finn didn’t owe Poe anything and Finn had just nodded.

 

“I know. I just don’t like clothes.”

 

“Okay.” Because Poe never asked for the “why”. Finn liked Poe because he never pushed. Finn liked Poe because Poe always thought he was better with ships than people and Finn thought the reverse.

 

“I can-if it makes you uncomfortable.”

 

“No, it’s fine, man.” Finn slept in a separate bed most of the time. When he cuddled with Poe, it was purely platonic. Well, mostly for Poe as well.

 

Rey, even on the island, slept in a seated position or sprawled out across the floor. She couldn’t bare a bed. Luke didn’t say anything. He could say many things about his childhood but he had a bed, he had a family, which was much more than most. Rey slept on the floor or sitting up against the wall and all Luke could do was offer to show her how to use a lightsaber.

 

Luke had fought a Darksider and brought him back to the light. He’d won his war and let another occur. No, that’s wrong. Another war occurred. The Jedi are not omnipotent, they repeat the same mistakes because it is human nature. Blame Ben, blame Luke, blame the parent, spare the rod and spoil the child, but it is not the same mistake.

 

BB-8 curled up against Rey, in zirs absence of Poe. BB-8 trusted Finn to take care of his master and ze didn’t trust this Skywalker fellow.

 

So yeah, Rey slept on the floor. She had a lightsaber close at hand and a droid who scanned the room at random intervals.

 

Luke stayed the hell out of it. He had his own demons to battle but he’d had a somewhat stable childhood. Probably good that he did, otherwise he would’ve gone insane. People are given the demons that they can handle. People are the creation of their own demons and they create their own demons.

 

(You are someone’s demon and you are your own salvation)

 

Poe didn’t sleep anymore. He couldn’t. Before Rey, before Finn, he had just been another Resistance fighter, just another guy imitating Han Solo. Now his mind had been invaded by the same six year old that he had chased around a Resistance base. Wouldn’t it be easier if the demons we saw at night had no childhood? Poe would find Leia in the cafeteria and sit next to her. She would lean into his shoulders.

 

Leia Organa had lost her father, mother, husband, son and a part of her brother to the Dark side. And all she could do in the morning was to roll out of bed and shrug on her clothes because she had people, people who were scarred, who were afraid, who didn’t know-couldn’t know-that their general was quaking in her boots. So while Luke got to sit on a far off island, she marched through briefings and scrunched, dirty faces. She marched on, not because she was brave though she was in a way, but people she had people counting on her and there was no others left.

 

Her hands didn’t tremble anymore. She didn’t wear socks because her toes would sweat and jerk in her boots.

 

Bravery is not written in quick acts and quicker deaths. It is written when there is nobody else to do the job. Bravery is getting up over and over again because there is nobody left.

 

The other war heroes were either dead or had left like Luke.

 

Leia couldn’t blame them. If she had less duty burned into her bones, she’d be gone too. Duty had been cut into her in cell block AA-23, cell 2817. She faced a monster in a cell.

 

(She wore white, he wore black. Identify if any of them were truly evil or just lost)

 

She couldn’t blame Luke. He was a sensitive person. Leia had been a princess, a soldier, a diplomat, and a mother. Name one of her duties where she wasn’t a badass.

 

Luke had fought Vader. He had done enough. Stop judging the breaking point of others. You are not their pain, you are not their decisions.

 

Han Solo is dead. He didn’t get a grave for his widow to visit. She would go out and stroke the _Falcon_ , but there wasn’t time to mourn. There is a war on. There are more children who can be saved. This is your heart. Let it rumble in the distance. There is a war on. **_There is always a war on._ **

 

Her brother had the Force. She had faces in those years, faces of victims, screaming, crying and laughing people. Ben had raced through the same hallways that people swore that they would kill her son in and she couldn’t blame them. She couldn’t even be angry. It’s hard to defend a lost cause. Nobody is truly lost but not all people can save all people.

 

(If you help enough people, if you run hard enough, maybe if you’re very very lucky, you can save yourself)

 

Luke lived in isolation, choosing only a shadow of the Force and his grief and guilt. He left because he wasn’t sure that he wouldn’t go Dark. Ben wasn’t his only Padawan. So the last Jedi followed the tradition of isolating himself. The Resistance will say that he planned to have another person to come to be trained. It was a nice sort of ignorance.

 

Poe leaned against the General because sometimes, somebody needs to be leaned against. He came from a large family. He grew up with a bed and a family who weaned him on tales of heroes. He grew up in the same hallways that Ben would turn against. He hadn’t had a rough start and he didn’t envy Finn or Rey.

 

Chewie slept on the _Falcon_. He wouldn’t sleep on the same base that raised Ben until his godson was finally put to rest. He lost his godson and his best friend in one go. The only reason he hadn’t gone down with Han was because of Rey. He would sit in the same co-pilot seat that he would’ve sat in with Ben to his left. And he stayed because Ben was his, still, and Rey was also his. Wookies live long. It’s a lot of time to acquire new material for nightmares.

 

And some nights, nobody could sleep. After bad missions, taco nights, or because it was a night on a day that ended with a “y”.

 

Leia would get a few folks to round up a holovid. Poe would cuddle with Finn and Rey in the front row. And everybody who wanted to avoid sleep would all pile in one large room. Leia still kept a steady hand on a small blaster (she might have ridden a desk for years but her desks had a nasty habit of being in warzones). The droids would be intermixed through the crowd, calling out comments about the movie. Chewie sat in the back.

 

Luke would even stand in the back.

 

And for a moment, a single, nearly missed moment, it seemed like everything was going to be fine.

  
It’s a lie, but it’s the kind sort.

**Author's Note:**

> I write these things at this point because I am angsting over the destruction over the expanded universe, especially because one of Han and Leia's kids actually did go Darkside. Yep.


End file.
